Entertainment: From Akon to Ed Hardy

It's an interesting time for Indian cinema. Lots of new blood. Young filmmakers are taking us away from the tried-and-tested formulaic films of the '90s.

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Imran Khan

November 9, 2010

ISSUE DATE: November 15, 2010

UPDATED: November 14, 2010 07:44 IST

Actor Anil Kapoor and director Danny Boyle.

It's an interesting time for Indian cinema. Lots of new blood. Young filmmakers are taking us away from the tried-and-tested formulaic films of the '90s (not too far away though. You've still got to appeal to the masses.) and young stars are connecting with a younger audience (I hope). The times they are a-changing in Bollywood. Gone are the days when producers had to rely on briefcases of money from the underworld to fund their films; now we have BMW-driving, suit-wearing corporate-types who subject scripts to market analysis and focus group testing before they invest. Oh, and we don't like to use the word "Bollywood", it's so? derivative.

Which brings me to what we're talking about: the American influence on Indian films. We shall gloss over the tendency of some (okay, many) people who are so "influenced" by Hollywood films that they recreate them in Hindi. That's not really relevant to this discussion; it speaks more of a moral and creative bankruptcy that, frankly, I find rather depressing. No, we're talking about the increased "Westernisation" of Hindi films nowadays. Having recently starred in a Hindi film called I Hate Luv Storys (available now on DVD), I think I am well placed to give you an inside perspective on this trend.

It all started in the late '50s; up until then, heroes wore dhotis and kurtas, and portrayed simple, downto-earth and inherently Indian characters. Shammi Kapoor changed all that. He wore cool jackets, danced like Elvis and played rich, flamboyant and flirtatious characters. My grandfather, Nasir Hussain, who directed him in many of his early hits, was also greatly responsible for this switch, I think. Suddenly, heroes were no longer relatable every-men. They were aspirational. They started to show us how we should be, not how we are. How we should dress, not how we do. They became the brand ambassadors of what is cool. And once that snowball started rolling, there was no stopping it.

Cut to the present day (see how I tossed in some film slang there), where films are in Hinglish, the heroines wear Lanvin and the heroes are chefs at the corner bistro in New York and it's easy to say that we're no longer connecting with the masses (there's that word again), but hold on just a second. Take a peep out the window and you'll notice something interesting. The streets are crawling with guys with spiked haircuts and fake Ed Hardy T-shirts. They're listening to Akon on their cellphones with built-in MP3 players (interestingly, Akon is now recording a song for a forthcoming Hindi film and you may or may not have heard, but Snoop Dogg sang a duet with Akshay Kumar two years ago).

What does that tell you? It tells me that the times, they aren't just a-changing in the Indian film industry (much more respectable than the "B" word, isn't it?), but also out there in the real world. American popular culture has permeated our country at pretty much every level, and it's happened in a very short span of time. Their movies are dubbed into regional languages, their sitcoms run on every channel, and their apparel is sold in the smallest towns in India. We have received a crash course in how to be American, and it seems we have a taste for it. I'm not going to go into the alarming increase in credit card debt this country has seen over the last few years (another cornerstone of American culture); I'll leave that for the smart people to talk about. I'll just leave you with this thought: What if our films are simply a reflection of ourselves? What if these shallow, wannabe, Americanised films are just showing us what we're becoming?

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